Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 03:45:46 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "lists" <lists@vivdev.com> Cc: <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD & GNU Message-ID: <004201c0b521$2192f040$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <v04003a02b6e33f2a9b08@[192.168.1.100]>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: lists [mailto:lists@vivdev.com] >> > >OK, but how would anyone take control of the source in the case of FreeBSD? >In the case if FreeBSD, the source is a bunch of volunteers? > You just answered your own question - "as long as the source is a bunch of volunteers" Who just announced recently they were synchronizing their _commercial_ operating system code to FreeBSD? Well, it's BSDi, who also owns Walnut Creek, the major FreeBSD distributor. In a few years, the source won't all be volunteers. Now, so far there's been no incidents of BSDi going to the FreeBSD project and saying "Don't make that change in the kernel there because if you do and we make it then it will break all our commercial users" Hopefully that day will never come, and BSDi will be wise enough to stay out of the Project in these instances. But, there's a lot of crossover of employees at BSDi and contributors to the Project. There are certainly going to be instances where this will create conflicts of interest on some technical decisions. While, at the current time I don't feel that any of the core FreeBSD Project members would be influenced by such conflicts, nobody knows what the future will bring, and it's always a risk to set up these types of environments where there's a lot of corporate influence. >> >>In the history of marketing, there's never been a single source supplier >>that has lasted for more than a blink of an eye, just due to this issue. > >Maybe. How about Ma Bell? Didn't die due to lack of standardization. >Died when the monopoly, which was underpinned by protected proprietary >technology, was dismantled. > Ma Bell was selling a product, dialtone, that for nearly 80 years was very much like electricity in that it was pretty much unchanging. As such, the market could tolerate the lack of innovation, since really there wasn't anything to innovate. What set the seeds for Bell's destruction, ironically, was the invention of the transistor by Bell Labs. With modern electronics, it became possible to cheaply and rapidly make all sorts of new consumer telephone devices. The first cracks appeared when people attempted to plug in these new devices and were told by Bell that they wern't allowed to do it. The market revolted and forced Ma Bell out of home ownership of the telephone. (that was a significant concession of their market, if you think about it) The transistor also permitted modern, reliable and cheap phone switches which allowed the competitive long distance carriers to take hold and once again the market revolted when Ma Bell attempted to block them, the result was the lawsuit. >What you are describing is a situation where one proprietary product has >reached it's market potential and then is outmoded by a newer, more >competitive product. I don't see how this supports your argument. > The catch-22 is that the newer more competitive product is only competitive precisely because it's NOT the institutionalized standard. The process of becoming the standard makes it non-competitive. Your getting hung up in the idea that it's the proprietaryness that makes a product non-competitive, and this simply isn't true. It's the institutionalizing that makes it non-competitive. For example, take Sendmail. For years Sendmail was the only game in town in terms of MTA's But, it became institutionalized, and as such they didn't drop the obscuficated sendmail.cf config file syntax even when the original reasons for having such syntax (speed of loading, etc) no longer were true. In fast, instead of dumping sendmail.cf, they just applied even more layering to harden the dependence on sendmail.cf As a result, people started putting effort into qmail, and other MTA's, and now those MTA's are taking more and more market share from Sendmail. Further, more significantly, products like qmail now have mySQL support, Sendmail doesen't, better and more integrated spam filtering, and a number of other features. All they lack is the track record to be truly proven out like Sendmail is. But, they are ahead in the technical aspect, and are increasing in share within the UNIX market. >Also, in the space you are describing, shouldn't there be sun and hp >machines? How do these offerings mix? The other thing is that the UNIX >they are turning to now includes Linux and BSD, doesn't it? Btw, what is >the status of vanilla UNIX? > Keep in mind that I'm only outlining a projection of what MIGHT happen, there's no guarentee that it WILL happen. It's perfectly possible that Open Source is such a fundamentally different means of software creation and distribution that none of the older marketing rules apply, and as such history can't repeat, because this hasn't been done in history before. In fact, I even make that argument in my book. I'm lumping all UNIX together, both commercial and Open Source, because I'm talking about general trends. I feel in my bones that the wind is changing again and that corporate interests are much more open now to considering UNIX instead of blindly swallowing Windows. But, many will never be open to Open Source, and will wish to continue to get those "commercial" systems, even UNIX, and so Sun and HP and Compaq will have lots to do making products for those folks. As far as Vanilla UNIX goes, today there's only 2 kinds of UNIXes - those blessed by The Open Group (since they own the trademark to UNIX) as being Real UNIX, and to get that you have to pay a big fee and implement a bunch of standards that nobody uses in your UNIX. The other are the non-UNIX UNIXes, like FreeBSD and Linux, which can't legally be branded UNIX yet implement 80% of what TOG says a "Real UNIX" is supposed to have. >Is NT a dominant player in that market? Seemed late to the party, not >better, and frequently to disappoint it's customers. > NT/2K is _the_ dominent player in mid-level servers today with Linux a close second. > >Returning to software, aren't the variant forms of commercial linux supply >examples of a business model that uses the standardized software and >hardware to it's advantage in pursuing a very different business model? The penetration statistics of the various "brands" of Linux today are one of the more hotly debated arguments. I don't have an answer because I don't know if todays Linux market is that of one single monopolistic dominant player (ie: Red Hat) with a lot of smaller ones, or all of the brands have equal penetration. >And couldn't you argue that yahoo, for example, has created a massive OS >and suite of apps that are recognizable yet unique based on FreeBSD? Yes, I don't know if it's relevant, though. I'm not talking apps, I'm talking OS here. Btw, >what _does_ amazon run on? > >Microsoft's two main sources of revenue to this day are windows and office. >Without the ability to make products that are un-knockoffable due to >proprietary information that is not shared with third party (competitive) >developers, they would have _no means_ of enforcing their agreements with >Dell and others. > Part of this argument is the "DR-DOS" argument and it's been proven to be fallacious. DR.DOS was a clone of MS-DOS as you should know. The idea behind it was to make a competitive DOS to MS-DOS and price it cheaper and split the DOS market. It never worked because DR-DOS didn't offer any increased functionality over regular MS-DOS that was significant enough to induce people to switch. Because it was a clone it retained all of the bad parts of MS-DOS. Users all decided that for the slight benefit of a cheaper OS, that wasn't offset by the potential incomatability. In short, if your a user who has bought-off on the idea of running all your apps on DOS, then going the last 10 feet and purchasing the actual Real McCoy instead of the fake was the smart thing to do. Extrapolate this to be 2 competitve versions of Windows - the runner-up would probably fail for the same reasons. You are right about one thing - the competitive edge to the Office suite, though. Clearly, withholding details that would help Office's competitors certainly does indicate that Microsoft is actually treating both the OS and the Application as a single product. This means that out of the desktop PC software market, the actual coverage of the single windows/Office product is far larger. That weakens their argument that they are not a monopoly. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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